Debussy’s La Mer is so famil­iar that it’s easy to for­get how rev­o­lu­tion­ary a piece it was when it was fin­ished in 1905. After a gazil­lion per­for­mances, it still remains fresh. We are accus­tomed to think of it as a pure exam­ple of “expres­sion­ism”, a kind of musi­cal equiv­a­lent of Monet’s fuzzy lily pads and flow­ers, and it is indeed that. But at the same time, it exhibits a strict clas­si­cism in its struc­ture, and roman­tic dynamism in that a “sto­ry” unfolds as each sec­tion devel­ops from hints in pre­vi­ous sec­tions, and it trav­els through the emo­tions as much as any high roman­tic sym­phony. In fact, it is fair enough to call it a sym­phony, if you think more in terms of the last Sibelius sym­phony than of Beethoven or Schu­bert. So it gives us the best of three worlds. Like most peo­ple who lis­ten to clas­si­cal music, I some­times neglect to lis­ten prop­erly to “con­cert chest­nuts” like this. In fact, it had been quite some time since I had giv­en La Mer any thought. What trig­gered a return to it was lis­ten­ing to anoth­er impres­sion­ist work about the sea, much less well-known, Arnold Bax’s The Gar­den of Fand.

Fand leaves her lover Cu Chu­lainn (Man­an­nan MacLir in the mid­dle casts a spell of obliv­ion upon his wife, Fand) — Illus­tra­tion by Yvonne Gilbert

Arnold Bax (1870–1953) was an Eng­lish com­poser who became obsessed with Irish music, poet­ry and mythol­ogy. He is best known for a series of tone poems on celtic themes, of which Tin­tagel (1917) is the best known, and The Gar­den of Fand (1913–16) is the best. I’ve loved this piece for most of my life, though for a long time could only find a sin­gle record­ing of it. For­tu­nately, it was by Adri­an Boult, the most sym­pa­thetic and able Bax inter­preter. Bax had lit­tle fame or suc­cess dur­ing his life­time. The ear­ly tone poems had a mod­est suc­cess, but his sev­en sym­phonies dropped into obliv­ion. How­ever, Sibelius felt his work was first-rate, and the two men formed a last­ing friend­ship. It was the advo­cacy of Adri­an Boult that slow­ly brought Bax back into view, though most of his works were not avail­able on record until the 1980s. Sibelius’s influ­ence is vis­i­ble in his work, but not obvi­ously so. Debussy’s influ­ence is more obvi­ous, with the French­man’s par­al­lel thirds shift­ing by whole tones, and sparkling wood­wind orna­ments. But Debussy tends to evoke nature with dis­pas­sion, while Bax invokes a more super­nat­ural, even creepy sen­si­bil­ity. The Gar­den of Fand is based on an ancient Irish epic from the Ulster Cycle tale, Ser­g­lige Con Culainn (The Sickbed of Cúchu­lainn). Fand is a Celtic sea god­dess, asso­ci­ated with the tran­si­tion to the oth­er world, faerie. The peren­nial Irish hero, Cúchu­lainn, tan­gles with her, to his per­il. What has always appealed to me about the piece is it’s sin­u­ous, shape-shift­ing melody, which has stuck in my mind far more than most. Around it, Bax weaves no end of dra­matic sur­prises. It’s a fab­u­lously inven­tive piece, with sud­den changes of tem­po and sur­pris­ing effects. Lit­tle twin­kling fig­ures trans­form into sin­is­ter for­tis­si­mos. Like Celtic myth, the piece is decep­tive, noth­ing ever remain­ing the same for long, and noth­ing being quite what if first appears to be… in short, it’s like the sea.